Tuesday’s Election in Los Angeles County : Slow-Growth Proposition U Captures Most of the Attention Among City-County Issues

Proponents and critics of a sweeping slow-growth initiative on the Los Angeles city ballot expect the measure to be approved on Tuesday, and attention is already turning to what the measure will mean beyond the election.

Proposition U, one of three city and county measures on the ballot, is the most extensive single-shot effort to limit commercial development in the city’s history. If it wins overwhelmingly, it could clear the way for a new era of growth-control politics.

Proposition U would cut in half the size of new buildings allowed on more than 70% of the commercial and industrial property in the city. Proponents, including a large network of Westside and Valley homeowner groups, say the measure is needed to control sprawling commercial projects and traffic problems. Opponents, including development interests, claim that it is a meat-ax solution to complex planning problems and will stifle economic growth and creation of jobs.

Among adherents, the measure and its prospect of victory have inspired a grass-roots uprising against City Hall’s claim to a prized political prerogative--how and where development should occur. And that victory, Proposition U’s supporters say, will merely be the opening shot in a campaign to reform a city government that, they claim, has become a captive of development interests.

Already there is talk among the measure’s supporters of follow-up ballot initiatives to control the size and location of large apartment and condominium projects and, more ambitiously, to restructure the city’s development-approval process by creation of neighborhood-oriented community planning boards.

Both sides expect lawsuits, some challenging, some seeking enforcement of Proposition U’s provisions, as well as project-by-project battles over developments that exceed the initiative’s limits. City planners, meanwhile, are bracing for an increase in applications for zone changes as developers try to regain lost building rights, particularly on about 200 commercial projects already approved but not yet built.

Development industry officials are looking ahead, too. Because more growth-control initiative’s are expected, Dick Wirth, government affairs director of the Building Industry Assn., said developers may try to turn the tables on slow-growth advocates. Builders may seek state legislation that would require full environmental impact reports before land-use initiatives can be placed on the ballot.

“The scary part” of Proposition U, Wirth said, is that it would change land-use policy without “findings as to whether it has a detrimental or positive effect.”

The other two city ballot measures have aroused nothing like the interest of Proposition U. The more controversial is Proposition V, the so-called Jobs With Peace initiative.

Several large aerospace firms, claiming that the proposal is costly and potentially threatening to their business and jobs, have banned together to fight the measure with a television, radio and billboard campaign.

Proponents are relying on a grass-roots campaign and hope to repeat a 1984 victory, when a less controversial Jobs With Peace measure was approved by 61% of the voters.

Another city measure, Proposition W, would streamline procedures for issuing housing development bonds. It has no organized opposition.

Proposition J, the single county measure on the ballot, would help alleviate chronic overcrowding in the jail system, which has been the subject of government investigations and federal lawsuits.

Supporters, who have begun airing radio commercials, are confident that voters will endorse expansion of jail facilities, now 60% over the system’s 12,300-inmate capacity.

Sheriff Sherman Block, the leading supporter of the $96-million bond measure, has warned that unless the bond issue receives the required two-thirds approval, other unspecified county services will have to be curtailed to provide the money.

The only organized opposition to the measure comes from the California Libertarian Party, whose members argue that jail overcrowding could be eliminated if “victimless” crimes, such as prostitution, are decriminalized.